Tin Man Can iPhone Review

Tin Man Can stars a rather likeable little alien construct, sucked into a wormhole during an inter-stellar outing only to find himself having to race through wormholes after a nasty space-based prang. Part-robot, part unicycle, you need to help him gather up the fuel canisters that are now spread across a series of worlds so that you can get him on his way back home.

While each of the game's four sets of levels slowly introduce new obstacle types and power-ups, the core gameplay in each land is the same. Your character Tic automatically rolls his way along brightly colored hills and valleys, but with a press of the screen you can send him soaring into the sky. Handy really, as there are plenty of dangerous chasms to negotiate, and if he falls off the bottom of the screen you'll have to restart the level. The gameplay's a little trickier than it sounds though, because Tin Man can only carry so much fuel at a time and once his tank's empty he'll drop to his doom.

To prevent that, each level has a large number of upgrades called Hovatrons peppered throughout it. Touching one of these fills up the meter (as does rolling along terra firma), and you're going to need to balance fuel expenditure with collection very carefully as you swoop around the landscape to pick up all three of the spaceship fuel canisters found in each one.

Once you reach the end of a run, those canisters are tallied up, and this total represents your "star" rating for the level. All of the Hovatrons you've collected are put into a pot too - these can be used to skip a level completely if you're really struggling with the game, although we think you'll only need a few attempts at even the trickiest levels.

And those levels do get tougher as you head deeper into the game. While at first the gameplay is simple, you'll soon have to contend with powerful fans which blow you off course (or fire you to safety), bouncy bits of land and perilously placed canisters. Towards the end of the game you'll even have to steer zippy spacecraft around certain levels, while still desperately grabbing those fuel canisters

At times though, Tin Man Can feels a bit like a game that promises more than it actually delivers. Levels come to feel a little bit samey after a while, and it's sometimes hard to know what's coming up next, making success a question of trial-and-error at certain point. There's replayability to be had from rael-time multiplayer racing, or going back to get every last fuel canister, but you'll likely prefer to just breeze through the levels and story.

If you're happy to treat the game as something you'll play through once then likely move on, then there's bags of entertainment to be had from Tin Can Man. Even if you choose not to go back for every last canister, and if multiplayer leaves you cold, it's still a dollar's worth of fun in anyone's book - just not perhaps much fun as it might have been.